FAKE POLITICS: How Corporate and Government Groups Create and Maintain a Monopoly on Truth, depressing in 2019...grim beyond words in 2025

FAKE POLITICS: How Corporate and Government Groups Create and Maintain a Monopoly on Truth
JASON BISNOFF
Skyhorse Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 hardcover; backordered, but used copies are available

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In “grassroots” campaigns, the grass isn’t always green—or natural.

In today’s chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing—creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm.

Fake Politics tells the stories of how this practice has transformed political activism into a veiled lobbying effort by the rich and the powerful. Through a series of vignettes involving the tea party, oil industry, big tobacco, big data, and news media, this book will explore the similarities and differences between various campaigns that appeared as grassroots but, in reality, were lobbying efforts fueled by governments, corporations, major industries, and religious institutions.

The process, named for the artificial grass fields at football stadiums and high schools across the country, became so prevalent in the last two decades that it now sits at a tipping point. In the era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” with the truth well on its way to becoming indistinguishable from fabrication, what can the past of astroturfing tell us about the future of grassroots activism?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: More important to read now than when it came out. I'm seeing the direst predictions made a generation ago about the effect of media "consolidation" not only coming true, but feeling like a relief from the "post-truth" landscape we're living in.

In writing my review I searched for "reviews" using the full book title. Literally no review not on a book sales site, and none of those in any way informative, came up. Searching for Author Bisnoff, I found nothing new by him except in something called "The Putnam Voice", and in no way does that person's bio suggest he's the author of this book. Similarly a LinkedIn profile of either the author or someone with his unusual name contain any reference no matter how tangential of this book's authorship.

This is very interesting, don't you think? A book written about the perversion of politics and the political process by gigantic piles of money controlled by people who like the status quo just fine, if they can't have a fascist dystopia, just...vanishes? You can always buy a used one.

You should. Footnoted to a fare-thee-well, Author Bisnoff, during Trump v1, details how "astroturfing" works, why it works, and who benefits from its use; all extremely relevant in the media landscape we possess in 2025.

I'm sensing an applecart that might not be wise, for the author, for me to upset. I will say that reading this book in 2025 is even more upsetting than it was in 2019. Then it was so deeply traumatic I couldn't bring myself to write a review.

I truly wish I had. Now, in 2025, the moral high ground I might've held is gone. I hope you'll seek out a print copy of this book and absorb its very sadly relevant message.